05-16-12 – Scavenger Hunt 2

I was just coming over here to let you guys know what happened. As for that specific error message, the message itself was inaccurate–it wasn’t so much that the image was swapped as that it was initially let through due to a bug then Fark later realized it was too big. From my post in the Fark Farktography Forum:

Heads up for this week’s Scavenger Hunt theme–there are several images that dropped overnight for being too large. There was a bug discovered that was allowing images to initially post even if they were too large and would be deleted later. This has been fixed now (thanks, Mike!), but the images that have been dropped can’t be restored because they’re larger than the 256k Fark file size limit. They can be reposted if you want to repost smaller sizes. This specifically affects powerful katrinka (an image at 402k and an image of 266k), sleeping (an image at 273k), fluffybunny (an image at 273k), predle (an image at 297k which has been reposted smaller), Yugoboy (an image at 277k), and Mista Sparkle (an image at 332k and 800 pixels wide–Fark’s limit is 640. It will physically resize, but the file size is still going to be an issue if you attempt to post large file images).

Every image that dropped was hosted at Flickr, which uses lossless or nearly lossless compression when generating its smaller sized images and thumbnails from the original files you upload. This was a change they made last year, and while it has improved image quality, it results in hugely bloated file sizes if you rely on Flickr to resize for you before posting on Fark. The easiest way to work around this is to upload a Fark sized original (640 pixels max width and 1100 pixels max height and 256k or smaller file size) to Flickr and use the “original” option from the share box on that Fark sized photo. The original is not resized/recompressed by Flickr, so you will know for sure it will work for Fark. If you want a larger-than-Fark-size version available, you can upload this separately to Flickr. When you post the Fark size version in-line for your entry, you’re welcome to include a line at the bottom linking to the larger version. Hope this helps, and sorry for the folks who lost images over night!!

Hm…wonder if you accidently grabbed the “medium” size link from the share menu? If you’re used to uploading bigger images and taking Flickr’s resized ones, I think it defaults to the last size you grabbed rather than the original, and the medium or large will be recompressed even if it’s the same 640 size as the original you uploaded. I did that once myself.

Oh crap, I missed that!!